Moving Forward New Director Of The Broward Center For The Blind Is Eager To Tackle Challenges Facing Troubled Agency.

Offer to help this blind man cross the street and he is likely to help you across instead. Expect him to move slowly down the sidewalk tapping his white cane, and he will zoom past you with his dog, Xia.

While directing the Lowell, Mass., Association for the Blind, Millar organized the first beep-baseball team in New England, which ended up televised nationally. He read to schoolchildren from Braille books to promote reading. He quadrupled that organization`s office space, increased its staff and got a grant for $30,000 in adaptive equipment -- all during a recession that has seen charitable giving drop all over.

He has even bigger plans for the Broward Center for the Blind, a $350,000-a- year organization that provides employment training and social services for many of the county`s 10,000 legally blind residents. Millar became the group`s executive director last month.

He is one of the country`s few blind directors of a local social service agency for the blind. There was plenty of competition. The job drew 129 other applicants.

The center`s board of directors did not realize Millar was blind until he showed up for the job interview. His total loss of vision was nowhere on his resume, board chairman Doug Macke said.

Millar, an athletic-looking 31, prefers not to talk about the accident that took his sight 10 years ago.

``It was just an unfortunate circumstance of events,`` he said. ``All it does is bring up unpleasant thoughts. I like to go forward from there.``

After becoming blind and going through rehabilitation, he lugged a Braille- writing machine from class to class to get bachelor`s degrees in general psychology and medical psychology and a master`s degree in education.

``I have the same degrees as anybody else. I just can`t see,`` Millar said.

Because of his blindness, Millar was a role model for the clients in Lowell, said Pamela Sudore, the former executive director of the Lowell Association for the Blind who hired Millar there.

Clients ``would come in and ask for rides and he`d say, `It`s such a nice day. If you`re only going two blocks, why don`t you just walk it?``` Sudore recalled. ``He got people to do things that I had been trying to get them to do for years.``

The Lowell job, Millar`s first one working with the blind, was a startling experience for him, Sudore recalled.

``He thought everyone blind was like him. It was a real blow for him to realize there are a lot of blind people who just feel sorry for themselves,`` she said.

In Broward, Millar enters an organization that has seen its budget plunge from more than $500,000 to $350,000; its staff drop from 16 to just 10. The last executive director left in May after continual disputes with the board of directors. That same month, a rehabilitation supervisor filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging that she wasn`t considered for a promotion because she is a woman.

Millar`s goal is to help train the blind for jobs and persuade employers that the blind are worthwhile workers. Most of all, he wants to educate the public that most visually impaired people want only to be treated like anybody else.

``It`s really a blind person`s job to educate people,`` Millar said. ``A lot of people will not approach somebody blind because they`re afraid to. It would be better if they did. A blind person would be very receptive and probably enjoy the conversation.``

If he is out with a companion, he said people often talk to the companion to get to him. At restaurants, waitresses have asked companions what Millar wants to eat, even though Millar is sitting right there.

Once, when he and Sudore were on an airplane together, a flight attendant asked Sudore if Millar needed a wheelchair to get around.

``Just talk to someone blind or visually impaired just as you would anyone else,`` Millar said.

Both of his goals are challenges. Nationally, 70 percent of the employable blind population is without a job, Millar said. He thinks that figure may be even higher in South Florida, which has fewer of the computer-industry jobs where many visually impaired people now work.

The Broward center sees about 250 clients a week, helping them learn to get around on their own, run a household, train for a job, learn to read Braille, and get access to psychological counseling -- especially for the many clients who get used to a low level of vision, only to have it deteriorate.

Millar plans to seek more publicity for the agency, hold career camps, send staff members to show schoolchildren how the blind function at home and at work, and give tours of the agency. The first open house is scheduled for Sept. 22.

Having once had sight, Millar said he can more easily conceptualize descriptions than if he had been born blind. He can picture colors and easily uses words like ``look`` and ``see.``

``On the other hand, I know what I`m missing. I can see how pretty a palm tree on the nice aqua-colored ocean behind it looks,`` Millar said. Then he added, ``I was lucky to see as long as I did.``